I recently posed this question on an Inside919.com blog. The respondents answered with a "yes", but did not have quantitative data to support their answers. I admit that I was still skeptical that participating in social media platforms was really going to help me build a business.
This week I received an email asking questions about how to build a blog with Wordpress. The email author indicated that she had seen some of my LinkedIn status updates and thought I might have some answers to her questions. Now that's exciting! Someone actually saw my LinkedIn updates.
Measuring Success
Obviously, the best way to measure success is to look at sales dollars and how fast they are growing. The problem with only looking at sales dollars is distinguishing between traditional business networking and social media participation.
There are several other measurements that may help to determine the value of participating in various social media platforms.
- Site traffic - I have the benefit of looking at data generated by my clients as well as my own site. Some of my clients are not actively "working their site". They have a site, but it is not updated frequently and the site owner is not promoting their work. My experience is that my site traffic is growing, while their traffic is stagnant.
- Micro - measurement - I have discovered several tools that help me to measure whether or not users are looking at specific posts that I make to social media platforms. For example, I can create a short URL link for my posts using bit.ly or ping.fm. Both of these sites track statistics for link click throughs. I can see which social media platform generated the most interest.
Another interesting "micro-measurement" tool is LinkedIn. Whenever I go to my home page I can see in the right-hand margin statistics about who has looked at my profile and how many times my profile has shown up in the search results. After I made some basic changes to my profile, the statistics improved considerably. Creating a keyword rich profile generated new traffic to my profile.
Social Media Platforms
It seems as though each social media platform has a slightly different audience. The prevailing content you see on each site is also a little different. Here is a summary of the key platforms that I am currently participating on:
Linked In
LinkedIn is a business professional networking tool. Participants create their own profiles which are focused on their professional background and job history. Your personal business network is created by asking people you know to join your business network.
LinkedIn profiles are heavily indexed by the search engines. When you search for your name using Google, a LinkedIn results page will almost always be in the top ten results.
I have heard that LinkedIn is being used heavily by recruiters when looking for new staff. The implication is that your LinkedIn profile needs to include the search terms that you think recruiters will use to find you. I made some changes to my profile and the changes show up on a LinkedIn search immediately.
I use Facebook to connect to friends, family, and lastly business associates. I can find many more business associates on LinkedIn than Facebook. However, it seems as though more business users are showing up on Facebook each day. In addition to your personal profile page, you can also create a separate "business" page.
I think Facebook users are really looking for personal information -- pictures and your connections. I'm planning to change my current "business" photo on Facebook to something more casual.
Twitter is a great way to connect to lots of other people. If someone does not want to follow your Tweets, they simply do not "follow you". On LinkedIn you are penalized if you invite people you don't know to join your business network. There is no penalty on Twitter.
I was a recent Tweet that indicated that the life of your individual Tweets is about an hour. It's really impossible to read every Tweet that gets posted by your network of Twitter associates (unless you just have too much time). However, if someone happens to be looking at Twitter when you post, they will see your Tweet.
My Tweets are normally business related and often I will post about articles that I have written. For example, when I am done writing this article, I will Tweet it to Twitter. It does help to generate new traffic to my site.
Summary
I do have several other strategies that I'm undertaking as a part of my overall social media and search engine optimization work. I will save some of these other topics for other blog posts.
My experience has been positive. Perhaps the biggest problem is that it is much easier for my introverted personality to work on my computer as opposed to simply picking up the phone and calling someone!
